Online Informal Language Learning Among Foreign Language Teachers: Activities and Purposes Analysis From a Complex Dynamic Systems Perspective

Introduction

Today’s online world provides foreign language users and learners with infinite opportunities to engage in a multitude of different receptive, productive, and interactive language activities. A social group that can derive major benefits from the availability of vast and diverse online resources in different languages is foreign language teachers. The internet is a rich source of materials that they can tailor to the needs of their learners. In addition, foreign language teachers often teach a language that is not their mother tongue (Canagarajah, 1999) and the online resources can help them to stay in touch with authentic language use and to further develop their foreign language competence. Therefore, language teachers can be considered good examples of successful and experienced language learners (Valmori & De Costa, 2016).

Research into online informal language learning has been limited to online use among secondary school and university students (Kusyk, 2017; Trinder, 2017; Lai, Hu, & Lyu, 2018; Lee & Dressman, 2018; Lyrigkou, 2018). However, students were reported to be unable to appropriately reflect on the association between online language use and language development (Sockett & Toffoli, 2012). Based on the premise that foreign language teachers would be better equipped to reflect on online foreign language use and development, this study presents case studies of three experienced higher education foreign language teachers from Slovenia: two teachers of Italian and one teacher of German.

To our knowledge, to date no research study has attempted to find if online informal language learning helps non-native foreign language teachers to maintain and to further develop their language skills, in particular when their predominant foreign language is not English. Therefore, this study will use the complex dynamic systems (CDS) theory to attempt an investigation into the nature of online informal language activities in the participants’ predominant foreign language and English as the global lingua franca, and to explore how these are interconnected with their predominant foreign language and English language development.